Chapter 18 #2
They loved like they sparred. Every movement was a dance; when one gave, another took.
Their fumbles with each other’s garments played the part of a battle, with the other fighting to gain the upper hand and accomplish it first. Every maneuver came with animated lunges, neither ceding any ground but their own skin.
He had it easier with her. Oste had loosened her dress and chemise with just a few well-aimed tugs of lace and fastenings.
The drapery slid down, down, down, and he followed it with rough kisses across her expanse.
She was nothing like other women he’d laid with, her body made of well-asserted, firm shapes bound together with an artisan’s accuracy.
She lacked the give he’d grown used to, each limb and her stomach hardly plush, instead sculpted with the harder surface of muscle.
That was a core that could stand as stalwart as a brick wall.
When he kissed her there, he didn’t miss how shyly she drew back, or hid into the shadows her rounder shoulders and thick thighs and calves.
Oste didn’t allow her this withdrawal, or any riposte she could come up with.
He held her fast and kissed harder, gripped tighter, and felt a throb between his legs when he felt the transitions from those areas of androgynous solids to the warm fat of her breasts and hips. He almost felt faint.
Dorotèa caught him off-guard during his distracted delight.
She grabbed the collar of his undershirt and jerked him back to her level, and every breath she exhaled was hot against his neck.
She was naked except for her rings and the flowers braided into her hair, but the styling had long since come apart in soft, curly strands.
He tried to close the gap again to kiss her where a lavender sprig hung down by her temple, but she pushed him back with a snarl and pounced on the last clothing items of his own.
She practically tore his white shirt off, and about wrestled him over the top of the nightstand to haul off his hose when she finally managed to get through the buttons.
He righted himself just as the garments went flying across the room and landed on an empty candlestick on the long table.
Dorotèa only slowed when he was bare, swaying like she was drunk once she was able to devour the rest of his appearance, and she did, hungrily, eating every inch of him with eyes alone.
Vulnerable was what he had said, and he felt it, burrowed under his skin where he wore the marks from an awful time, that same surface bronze like his mother who lived as condemned as he.
But when Dorotèa ravaged him with her gaze, eyes haunted with desire, Oste thought he really might be a fool.
It may well be true that many people spurned his flesh and the spirit locked inside, but one woman loving his scandalous parts felt in that moment more wondrous than the multitudes of old pains.
He was going to take her. His manhood started to throb, and his heart raced. He was going to—
“Aa—ah—h!” Oste cried out like a man wounded. That place between his thighs almost exploded in heat when a warm hand cupped his balls and pressed carefully along his most sensitive parts. “Dorotèa!”
“You were hiding these under your hose?” she accused, but her voice slid out heavy with wanting. She ran her thumb across them, and, skin aflame, Oste again made a labored sound of shock and fell back onto the bed.
Boudiou, he was going to die. He was going to die, and float away, and explode into millions of molten hot pieces.
His knee bent when he hitched up his leg, giving with her take, for Dorotèa crawled over the top of him and continued to play with everything but his shaft.
Anyone who’d once called him a respectable, strong fencer would only be able to laugh now at how pathetically he whimpered and moaned as he was taken in every way possible by her probing.
Just when he thought apoplexy would claim him, electric fingers withdrew and left him only with the brutal pricks of impossible sensitivity that made even his thighs twitch.
She bore down on him from above and remained as greedy as before, this time through kisses, which she abandoned freely across his heated skin.
Oste allowed it; he couldn’t manage anything but recovery from her onslaught and let her drink her fill.
She won that bout. Of that, he was certain.
“I’m going to—” she began, but Oste, finally rediscovering his composure, grabbed her by the waist and spun her sideways.
Dorotèa gasped just as he liked, then pinned her down from above.
His cock, as hard as it was throbbing, edged against her stomach as he leaned down and tickled her ear with his lips.
“You like being in charge, don’t you?” he rumbled.
“Yes.” Dorotèa wrapped her arms around his neck. Her breaths were ragged, and she trembled faintly where his masculinity pressed against her.
“My turn, ma chérie.”
“But I want to—”
Oste kissed her fiercely. Dorotèa moaned underneath him when he tugged back on her lip with his teeth, then let her go for just long enough to crawl to her left and open the drawer to the nightstand.
The scented oil was just where he’d left it, placed neatly next to the casing he had, just in case.
A physician ought to always have such things.
He considered grabbing the oil and getting on with it, but his momentary hesitation told him that he’d feel better if he asked. “Can I put my seed in you?”
Dorotèa raised a brow. “I get the option?”
“Not everyone is aware of it, but there’s tools and a practice where—”
“Yes, yes, I read your book. Put your seed in me, Oste, and piss off with that practice.”
Fair enough. He shoved the drawer shut and shivered in delight at the thought of doing as much.
Giving her his family name wasn’t enough for him; his rush of possessive ferocity made him feel like a madman.
He wanted his seed in her, and damn him if he didn’t pull it off.
He quickly slickened his shaft and lowered himself back down to her, searching between her legs with the same wet hand.
A woman’s flowering grace down there did not always stir him with quite the same arousal and delight as that of a man’s, but he usually found the balance in other assets.
Dorotèa was easy to like, even if other parts of her were more to his fancy.
He was taken with her smooth folds and tightness, well-matched to her powerful physique.
What he liked, though, also told him that it might very well hurt more.
“Try to relax,” he told her, voice husky.
Dorotèa scoffed. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
He blinked. “No, it actually would help with—”
“Take me kicking and screaming.”
“You are fucking terrifying.”
Oste parted her not with one, but two fingers to start, and she choked lightly in surprise.
She spasmed underneath his bulk and it heightened his lust. He kissed her neck and moaned as he felt her there, delighted in her silky wetness, and took the meat of her thigh with his other hand.
He coaxed it to the side, widening the gap he desired to take.
She pushed back at first, her other leg drawing closer; it was instinctive, he realized, unmatched with the ravenous pleasure illuminated in her eyes.
He pushed her harder, then didn’t give her the chance to close herself again.
Oste slid his fingers out and replaced them with a thrust that sent him inside her.
Dorotèa cried out and dug her nails into his shoulders.
Control was no longer hers; she pressed her face into him and made sporadic moans and whimpers when he began to move within, slowly at first, and gently.
No matter what she said, whatever had been done in the past around that same edifice of her body had not been gratifying or pleasurable. In some sense, all of this was new.
You deserve to love this.
“I want you,” Dorotèa told him, voice shrill. “I want you, please. I need you to… to…”
“I’m here.”
He went at her harder, but her playful ownership of him at the start spirited along his completion earlier than he would have liked.
It didn’t make it any less satisfying. His vision prickled, and his body pulsed with hot waves when his manhood throbbed and released, spilling himself into her, warm and wet.
Dorotèa moaned, curling into him, but he wanted more and knew a trick for it.
Though dizzy himself, Oste slipped a hand between her legs where he came, then brushed over her pearl tucked inside just as he’d learned from his libertine ways.
Dorotèa’s back arched like she’d been pierced, and the scream she loosened made him feel more drunk than any wine.
He slid out of her and collapsed onto his stomach by her side with a leg and arm draped over her body, which pulsed and twitched with each passing second.
She was shaking so much he thought she’d tumble right off the bed.
“What… What was that?” she squeaked out.
“Holy matrimony.”
“Be serious.”
“Your pleasure,” he said between panting breaths. He floated a finger towards her face and stroked her cheekbone.
She turned her head. Dorotèa’s entire body was moving with her exhales. “It… It feels like that for you too?”
Oste grinned. “Isn’t it something?”
But something happened that he did not expect.
Dorotèa abruptly burst into tears and hid her eyes with the flat planes of her palms. It was a furtive and messy display of emotions.
At once, he feared he had hurt her, and his humor fell away, displaced by concern when he gingerly took her wrists and attempted to scan her face.
“Dorotèa?” he called out softly. “Look at me.”
She did, lashes damp with tears that intermingled with the sweat from their romp. Her brown eyes, crystalline now with their new glossy sheen, spared nary a blink.